With the opening weekend of the 2010 festival, Hume has succeeded spectacularly. Festival First Night — a carnival that takes over the city centre and which launches the three-week cultural program — went off with a bang on Saturday, and there wasn’t a firework in sight. This was a party with art at its centre.
There were DJs and swing bands, Scottish pipers and Bollywood dancers, acrobats and light shows. On the huge outdoor stage in the Domain, a vast crowd roared its approval for the Black Arm Band and soul master AlGreen.
In a brief speech to launch the festival, Hume said she had been awed by the success of Festival First Night, instigated by her predecessor Fergus Linehan in 2008. It was an instant success, bringing Sydneysiders by their thousands to the heart of the city.
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Related Coverage
* Sydney digs Green machine and S&M touch Adelaide Now, 2 days ago
* Planting seeds for festivals to come The Australian, 3 days ago
* That it should come to this is no shame The Australian, 27 Dec 2009
* On your mark The Australian, 4 Dec 2009
* Festival Centre’s 2010 program unveiled Adelaide Now, 24 Nov 2009
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Hume’s first First Night was an improvement on the previous two in almost every way, not least the range of entertainment on offer and the logistics of managing almost frighteningly large numbers of people. Officials said that up to 250,000 attended First Night on Saturday, a similar number to last year.
The master of ceremonies was theatre director Nigel Jamieson, who was charged with the task of turning Sydney’s CBD into a huge outdoor theatre. The city’s streetscape and architecture were transformed by Jamieson’s clever use of light and improvised performance spaces.
The verandas of Parliament House and the Mint on Macquarie Street, for example, became elevated stages for bagpipes and a drumming band. In Chifley Square, the curved facades of the buildings that front the intersection were used to form an amphitheatre where DJs and rappers performed. Here, and on the tower block of the Supreme Court building, video projections enlivened usually dull facades with abstract patterns of light. Illuminated yellow spheres, like the yellow balloon that is the 2010 festival symbol, added to the festive atmosphere.
Hyde Park was divided into separate entertainment areas where children’s shows were presented in the afternoon, and which became a huge pleasure garden at nightfall. On a stage that resembled a scaffolding rig, aerial performers twisted and turned in midair, their shadows projected on to the sandstone walls of St Mary’s Cathedral behind them.
On another stage that looked like a red music box, with tiers of lighted compartments, Indian musicians performed Rajasthani music, adding exotic sounds to the sultry night air. This group, called the Manganiyar Seduction, and several others that took part in First Night, are also appearing in the ticketed festival program.
There were many ways to enjoy all of these attractions. Many people were content to picnic on the grass at Hyde Park or the Domain, allowing the entertainment to come to them and watching the world go by. Or one could wander from venue to venue and enjoy the experience of seeing the city in a new light. The crowd was large, sometimes uncomfortably so, but the general mood was convivial and people of all ages appeared to be enjoying themselves.
This was helped enormously by improvements in crowd control and amenities. In previous years, the onrush of people has created unpleasant and potentially dangerous overcrowding in some areas. With experience, the party planners seem to have refined the flow of human traffic.
Macquarie Street, for example, was not used as an entertainment area, as it was in 2008, but left open as a wide thoroughfare. Small laneways such as those around the City Recital Hall — an atmospheric location for small bars and musical groups but prone to crowding — were not used; instead, larger areas such as Chifley Square allowed easier movement.
Printed maps and well-placed information boards helped people navigate the entertainment areas. The festival’s principal sponsor, a bank, provided free water bottles, top-ups, and battery-operated fans. These things may be small considerations, but all contributed to a safe and enjoyable First Night.
Hume’s ticketed program — and the cultural festival proper — began on Friday with Hamlet from Berlin’s Schaubuhne theatre, a company making its Sydney debut after previous seasons at the Adelaide Festival.
This Hamlet, performed in German, is twisted this way and that. It starts with “To be or not to be”, ends with “The rest is silence”, and much in between is a mash-up of Shakespeare, new text by Marius von Mayenburg, improvisation, and wildly physical, elemental theatre. Thomas Ostermeier’s production pushes Hamlet’s conflicts and passions to the foreground: his inability to bury his father, his play-acting, his attraction and loathing for his mother and Ophelia (Judith Rosmair, in an alarming transformation, plays both), his madness. Lars Eidinger as Hamlet is outstanding among a terrific ensemble cast of six.
The Schaubuhne Hamlet draws powerfully on myth and archetypal stories: a connection made explicit by notes in the printed program from Freud (“Shakespeare’s Hamlet is rooted in the same soil as Oedipus Rex”) and Slavoj Zizek (“Hamlet Before Oedipus”).
By opening the festival, it also points to the beginning of a theme that will gather more threads over the ensuing weeks. Hume has suggested that she wants her festival programs to have a kind of meta-narrative, linking together different events and giving festivalgoers a sense of an intellectual and emotional journey.
Viewed in this way, Hamlet finds its counterpoint late in the festival with Oedipus Rex, Stravinsky’s setting of a libretto by Jean Cocteau, based on Sophocles. Similar to Schaubuhne’s Hamlet, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex condenses and intensifies the dramatic action.
Peter Sellars, who is directing the production, says the opera-oratorio will be presented as a kind of ritual, a ceremonial cleansing.
Elsewhere in the festival, other themes emerge: for example, the story of Candide and its satire on optimism, in a dramatic adaptation of Voltaire’s novella from Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, and in Bernstein’s operatic one. The subject of happiness and hopefulness will be teased out in The Scope, a program of discussions with prominent thinkers.
Festival visitors will follow their own paths and lines of inquiry: what, after all, is a festival if it is not a doorway to new experiences? And, amid the celebratory mood of Saturday night, the door was spectacularly flung open.
The beauty of Festival First Night is that it invites a spirit of playfulness and adventure that is the precursor to intellectual engagement
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